The acclaimed film director presents for the first time in Greece a large exhibition of 182 photographs he has taken over the last five years.
Visitors to the Onassis Foundation in Greece now have the opportunity to discover a different, lesser-known artistic side of Yórgos Lánthimos.
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The internationally acclaimed director and multi-award-winning master of moving images is presenting his deep passion for still photography, through a major exhibition, aptly titled ‘Photographs.’
Lánthimos' love for this medium has developed over the last five years, as he freely admits it offers him freedom in relation to filmmaking and the added pressure of dealing with big studios.
"What I like about photography is mainly the way in which it is differentiated from cinema, even though technically both start from the same point. In film school you learn right away that cinema is essentially 24 pictures a second. So technically you have to go through the process of learning photography," explained Lánthimos at the inauguration of the exhibition.
"I didn't know from the beginning that I would be so interested in photography per se. So I also started by putting in my mind that I had to learn it technically and to move on to what I was most interested in, which was film. Slowly, through the process of filmmaking, which I had to use photography anyway, I began to love it more and more, because it gave me another outlet during the making of the films.
"I also really like the practical connection too. I like cameras very much. I like the darkroom, developing film, printing photos. The immediacy of creating something. That is, you can go for a walk, shoot a roll of film, go home, develop it, print two photos and hold them in your hand and look at them. All of this has a very immediate satisfaction or disappointment when you haven't done very well. But the satisfaction is very great and immediate compared to other things again," added Lánthimos.
The exhibition at the Onassis Cultural Centre is developed in four sections. The first three revolve around the places and people who star in his films. These are photographs taken on the sidelines of filming, in city locations and in studios.
The fourth set, presented for the first time worldwide, is an ongoing series of personal black and white photographs taken in Greece.
In these photographs, collected during solitary walks on the outskirts of Athens and on visits to Greek islands, Lánthimos focuses on the everyday and the banal, exploiting the medium's potential for abstraction and transformation: "I remember that I always liked taking black and white photographs. Even when I started in Greece, working on commercials where everything had to be very clean and very beautiful, I always had a tendency to shoot black and white," explained Lánthimos.
"I left for about ten years and when I came back, in a way, I had gained a distance from Greece. At that time I think I very consciously chose black and white, not in relation to ugliness, the opposite in relation to a postcard aesthetic that is familiar to us. And because I was very interested in photographing on the islands, on the sea, in places like that. I didn't want these postcard colors to distract from the subject itself. I wasn't trying to hide the ugliness. What I wanted was more to not distract from what I was interested in in these particular images."
Designed in the form of a classical Greek temple, the exhibition creates a central space reminiscent of an altar, where 110 new works by Lánthimos are displayed, while the three sets of works linked to his films are presented on the outer perimeter, so that the audience moves from his well-known work to the inner core of his new photographic work.
"I think the most interesting and exciting element of this exhibition is the idea that we have an extraordinary filmmaker. Not many people know that for the last five or six years he has also been using a camera," said curator of the show Michael Mack.
"Along with making his films, he's also taking his own photographs. But more importantly, he also creates personal works. There is a relationship between cinema and photography. But what you see is a revolution in his way of thinking about the possibilities of photography, where he enters this private space of creating personal works in relation to his homeland," added Mack.
Many of the images are included in his recent photography books: "Dear God, the Parthenon Is Still Broken" (2024), from the filming of Poor Things (2023), "i shall sing these songs beautifully" (2024), created in parallel with Kinds of Kindness (2024), and "VISCIN" (2026) with unpublished photographs from the filming of his latest film, Bugonia (2025).
"It is very clear that his work comes from a particular tradition of photographic engagement with the man-made environment. A history that goes back to the 60s and 70s from the environmental movement, especially in America, where people were looking at the impact of humans on the landscape," said Mack.
Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs is on the Onassis Cultural Centre at the Onassis Foundation in Athens until 17 May 2026.
